In this circle, Widmerpool had made himself an accepted, if not specially popular, figure. There was no question here of his being looked upon by the rest of the community as the oddity he had been regarded at school. In the weeks that followed I came to know him pretty well. We talked French to each other at meals, and kept up some show of using French during expeditions: alone together — usually late in the evening, when the others had gone to their rooms, to devote themselves to study, or to rest — we used to speak English; although Widmerpool rarely did so without making some reference to the reluctance with which he diverged from the rule of the house. He used to work hard at the language all the rest of the time. In spite of inherent difficulty in making words sound like French, he had acquired a large vocabulary, and could carry on a conversation adequately, provided he could think of something to say; for I found that he had no interest in anything that could not be labelled as in some way important or improving, an approach to conversation that naturally limited its scope. His determination to learn French set an example from which I fell lamentably short. In his rigid application to the purpose for which he came to France, he was undoubtedly the most satisfactory of Madame Leroy’s boarders, even including the industrious Monsieur Örn, who never could get his genders right.
Like Monsieur Dubuisson, Widmerpool showed no enthusiasm for Paul-Marie’s jokes.
“That boy has a corrupt mind,” he said, not many days after I had been in the house. “Extraordinary for a child of that age. I cannot imagine what would happen to him at an English school.”
“He’s like Stringham as a small French boy.”
I said this without thinking at all deeply about the accuracy of the comparison. I did not, in fact, find in Paul-Marie any startling resemblance to Stringham, though some faint affinity must have existed between them, in so much that more than once I had thought of Stringham, when Paul-Marie had been engaged in one of his torrential outbursts of conversation. However, Widmerpool showed sudden interest in the identification of their two characters.
“You were rather a friend of Stringham’s, weren’t you?” he asked. “Of course I was a bit senior to know him. I liked the look of him on the whole. I should say he was an amusing fellow.”
For Widmerpool to imply that it was merely a matter of age that had prevented him from being on easy terms with Stringham struck me, at that time, as showing quite unjustifiable complacency regarding his own place in life. I still looked upon him as an ineffective person, rather a freak, who had no claim to consider himself as the equal of someone like Stringham who, obviously prepared to live dangerously, was not to be inhibited by the narrow bounds to which Widmerpool seemed by nature committed. It was partly for this reason that I said: “Do you remember the time when you saw Le Bas arrested?”
“An appalling thing to happen,” said Widmerpool. “I left soon after the incident. Was it ever cleared up how the mistake arose?”
“Stringham rang up the police and told them that Le Bas was the man they wanted to arrest,”
“What do you mean?”
“The criminal they were after looked rather like Le Bas. We had seen a picture of him outside the police-station.”
“But why —”
“As a hoax.”
“Stringham?”
“On the telephone — he said he was Le Bas himself.”
“I never heard anything like it,” said Widmerpool. “What an extraordinary thing to have done.”
He sounded so furious that I felt that some sort of apology was called for — in retrospect the episode certainly seemed less patently a matter for laughter, now that one was older and had left school — and I said: “Well, Le Bas was rather an ass.”
“I certainly did not approve of Le Bas, or of his methods of running a house,” said Widmerpooclass="underline" and I remembered that Le Bas had particularly disliked him. “But to do a thing like that to his own housemaster … And the risk he ran. He might have been expelled. Were you concerned in this too, Jenkins?”
Widmerpool spoke so sternly that for a moment I thought he intended to sit down, there and then, and, in a belated effort to have justice done, report the whole matter in writing to Le Bas or the headmaster. I explained that personally I had had no share in the hoax, beyond having been out walking with Stringham at the time. Widmerpool said, with what I thought to be extraordinary fierceness: “Of course Stringham was thoroughly undisciplined. It came from having too much money.”
“I never noticed much money lying about.”
“Stringham may not have been given an abnormal amount himself,” said Widmerpool, irritably, “but his family are immensely wealthy. Glimber is a huge place. My mother and I went over it once on visiting day.”
“But he is not coming in to Glimber.”
I felt glad that I had been supplied by Templer with this piece of information.
“Of course he isn’t,’’ said Widmerpool, as if my reply had been little short of insulting. “But there are all his mother’s South African gold holdings. That divorce of hers was a very unfortunate affair for someone so well known.”
I should have liked to hear more of this last matter, but, Stringham being a friend of mine, I felt that it would be beneath my dignity to discuss his family affairs with someone who, like Widmerpool, knew of them only through hearsay. Later in life, I learnt that many things one may require have to be weighed against one’s dignity, which can be an insuperable barrier against advancement in almost any direction. However, in those days, choice between dignity and unsatisfied curiosity, was less clear to me as a cruel decision that had to be made.
“And that thin, rather good-looking boy,” Widmerpool continued, “who used to be about a lot with you and Stringham?”
“Peter Templer.”
“Was he in the Le Bas affair too?”
“He was out for a walk with us on the same afternoon.”
“He did not have too good a reputation, did he?”
“Not too good.”
“That was my impression,” said Widmerpool. “That he was not a good influence in the house.”
“You and he were mixed up in the Akworth row, weren’t you?” I asked, not from malice, or with a view to keeping him in order on the subject of my friends, so much as for the reason that I was inquisitive to know more of that affair: and, considering the way that Widmerpool had been talking, I felt no particular delicacy about making the enquiry.
Widmerpool went brick-red. He said: “I would rather not speak of that, if you don’t mind.”
“Don’t let’s then.”
“I suppose Templer got sacked in the end?” Widmerpool went on: no doubt conscious that he might have sounded over-emphatic, and evidently trying to bring some jocularity into his tone.
“More or less asked to leave.”